Maech 1, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



325 



Professor Norton's kindness the permission 

 to read to you part of a letter from Colonel 

 Baird-Smitb, written shortly after the six 

 weeks' siege of Delhi in 1857, for the vic- 

 torious issue of which that excellent officer 

 was chiefly to be thanked. He wi-ites as 

 follows : 



* * * My poor wife had some reason to think 

 that war and disease between them had left very 

 little of a husband to take under nursing when 

 she got him again. An attack of camp-scurvy 

 had filled my mouth with sores, shaken every 

 joint in my body, and covered me all over with 

 sores and livid spots so that 1 was marvelously 

 unlovely to look upon. A smart knock on the 

 ankle-joint from the splinter of a shell that burst 

 in my face, in itself a mere bagatelle of a wound, 

 had been of necessity neglected under the pressing 

 and incessant calls upon me, and had grown worse 

 and worse till the whole foot below the ankle be- 

 came a black mass and seemed to threaten mortifi- 

 cation. I insisted however on being allowed to 

 use it till the place was taken, mortification or 

 no; and though the pain was sometimes horrible, 

 I carried my point and kept up to the last. On 

 the day after the assault I had an unlucky fall 

 on some bad ground, and it was an open question 

 for a day or two whether I hadn't broken my arm 

 at the elbow. Fortunately it turned out to be 

 only a very severe sprain, but I am still conscious 

 of the wrench it gave me. To crown the whole 

 pleasant catalogue, I was worn to a shadow by a 

 constant diarrhoea, and consumed as much opium 

 as would have done credit to my father-in-law." 

 However, thank God I have a good share of Tap- 

 leyism in me and come out strong under difficul- 

 ties. I think I may confidently say that no man 

 ever saw me out of heart, or ever heard one croak- 

 ing word from me even when our prospects were 

 gloomiest. We were sadly scourged by the cholera 

 and it was almost appalling to me to find that 

 out of twenty-seven officers present, I could only 

 muster fifteen for the operations of the attack. 

 However, it was done, and after it was done came 

 the collapse. Don't be horrified when I tell you 

 that for the whole of the actual siege, and in truth 

 for some little time before, 1 almost lived on 

 brandy. Appetite for food I had none, but I 

 forced myself to eat just sufficient to sustain life, 

 and I had an incessant craving for brandy as the 

 strongest stimulant I could get. Strange to say, 



' [Thomas De Quineey. — W. J.] 



I was quite imconscious of its affecting me in the 

 slightest degree. The excitement of the work was 

 so great that no lesser one seemed to have a/ny 

 chance against it, and I certainly never found my 

 intellect clearer or my nerves stronger in my life. 

 It was only my wretched body that was weak, and 

 the moment the real work was done by our be- 

 coming complete masters of Delhi, I broke dovra 

 without delay and discovered that if I wished to 

 live I must continue no longer the system that had 

 kept me up until the crisis was past. With it 

 passed away as if in a moment all desire to stimu- 

 late, and a perfect loathing of my late staff of life 

 took possession of me. 



Such experiences show how profound is 

 the alteration in the manner in which, 

 under excitement, our organism will some- 

 times perform its physiological work. The 

 metabolisms become different when the re- 

 serves have to be used, and for weeks and 

 months the deeper use may go on. 



Morbid cases, here as elsewhere, lay the 

 normal machinery bare. In the first num- 

 ber of Dr. Morton Prince's Journal of 

 Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Janet has dis- 

 cussed five cases of morbid impulse, with 

 an explanation that is precious for my 

 present point of view. One is a girl who 

 eats, eats, eats, all day. Another walks, 

 walks, walks, and gets her food from an 

 automobile that escorts her. Another is a 

 dipsomaniac. A fourth pulls out her hair. 

 A fifth wounds her flesh and burns her 

 skin. Hitherto such freaks of impulse 

 have received Greek names (as bulimia, 

 dromomania, etc.) and been scientifically 

 disposed of as 'episodic syndromata of 

 hereditary degeneration. ' But it turns out 

 that Janet's cases are all what he calls 

 psychasthenics, or victims of a chronic 

 sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy, fa- 

 tigue, insufScieney, impossibility, unreality, 

 and powerlessness of will ; and that in each 

 and all of them the particular activity pur- 

 sued, deleterious though it be, has the 

 temporary result of raising the sense of 

 vitality and making the patient feel alive 

 again. These things reanimate; they 



